It’s winter, it’s cold out, and I just don’t feel like thinking about Willie Bloomquist or straw and camels’ backs, or whether the Royals’ region of Blogfrica has become too negative. (My personal one-sentence stance on that debate: Yes, I have written negative things this offseason, but that’s because I don’t live on Fantasy Island.)
We’ll see if I can make it through this post without those negative things.
This afternoon I came across an interesting tidbit about various MLB teams using – or not using – advanced statistical analysis in their front offices. Aaron Gleeman talks about the Mariners’ recent hiring of seamhead extraodinaire Tom Tango (which I think is a giant leap for both Seattle and Tango himself), and about how the Twins are too gritty and toolsy to bother having a stats department. Apparently they can’t keep playing the game The Right Way(TM) while studying PitchF/X, UZR, etc.
That all reminded me of the discussion we had at Royals Review a while ago about how Dayton Moore and Co. use (or don’t use) advanced stats when assembling the Royals rosters.
It’s always a valid question, I think, to ponder whether Moore knows his way around a FanGraphs page, or if he sits around his office asking “What the heck is a CHONE?” At the time of the above-linked Royals Review discussion, I e-mailed Sam Mellinger to see if he could shed some light. Here’s what he said:
Dayton is a scout at heart, so I think it’s fair to say he’ll lean that way if it’s one or the other, but one of his top advisors is very sabermetric, gives him the info, and they also contract someone to provide them with more advanced stats, I believe.
…They’re not cavemen, walking through life just worried about batting average and RBIs, but they’re not Bill James, either. Depending on [your] definition of “in depth,” I’d say the collective saber understanding of JJ and Dayton is more than this person thinks, but
certainly not (fill in the name of your favorite saberperson here).
As time goes on in the Dayton Moore Era, we’re figuring out what he has up his statistical sleeve, and from where I sit (my mother’s basement, of course) it doesn’t look like much. He called Willie Bloomquist an “on-base guy,” probably based on his .377 OBP from last season. That violates some of the most basic principles of Seamheadism 101: Beware of small sample sizes, and don’t throw multi-year contracts at replacement-level guys based on outlier seasons. Oh, dangit, I brought up the Bloomquist thing again, didn’t I?
I do hope Dayton Moore is not a caveman, as Mellinger wrote. I’d love it if it were the Royals and not the Mariners who had hired Tom Tango, because someone in GMDM’s office needs to let Moore know that Wille Ballgame isn’t an on-base guy; that Mike Jacobs’ 32 homers hardly mean anything without the ability to get on base; that Jose Guillen is a very expensive sinkhole, and…well, I could go on, but I was going to try not to do that, wasn’t I?
I guess it’s just tiresome to see these same results time and again. I’m far from completely withdrawing my support for GMDM like Rany is, but Moore can’t get away with just talking about how important OBP is to him. He really needs to DO something about it, like sign one single player whose career OBP is even above league average.
It seems foolish to believe that Moore and his office staff have some high (or even moderate) level of sabermetric understanding when they can’t even understand the one number that’s at the heart of it all. If he doesn’t figure out OBP soon, the team will be the baseball equivelant of the Chiefs’ 2-14 mark. And that’s more suffering than even Kansas Citians should have to endure.
No related posts.
5 comments
Skip to comment form ↓
devil_fingers
January 17, 2009 at 1:44 pm (UTC 0) Link to this comment
Nicely put, minda. Brevity and straightforwardness always trump intolerable wordiness and lengthy digression…
I think it’s pretty clear that Dayton Moore, et. al. know about the sabermetric revolution, but the evidence is pretty clear that they prefer to live in comfortable exile. So Mellinger’s caveman analogy isn’t quite the right one — Moore is more like the King of Afghanistan, with a title that means something to someone, but is increasingly relevant in the modern world, and with little or nothing to rule.
That’s overly harsh — and the real fact of sabermetrics is not “stats only,” but putting stats and scouting and all that stuff in proper perspective.
Without getting into the Royals specifically, reading the accounts of people who have consulted for teams before like Tango, MGL, and others, the general take is that while every team is definitely aware, more or less, of most of the latest advances in baseball thinking, and all of them have at least one employee ostensibly who is a “stat person,” very few teams actually know what to do with that person.
This goes all the way back to Allen Roth (the original number cruncher who worked for Branch Rickey in the 1940s, helped him figure that OBP was the key, pitching and hitting were equally valuable, etc. Yes, people who say that OBP is a stat nerd invention are basicallly saying that Branch Rickey wasn’t a “good baseball man.”) was treated after Rickey left the Dodgers — he ended up in the press box basically being a scorekeeper the organization did its best to ignore.
The thing that’s most interesting about the Mariner’s new front office is that the new GM Jack Zduriencik is not as stats guy himself — he comes for the same sort of scouting background as Dayton Moore. And that’s a good thing. Of course, he was never the “hot prospect” that DMGM was, and certainly not as much of a pretty boy (and if you don’t think that made a difference in the way they were perceived…). And we don’t know how much he’ll actually listen to this big saber-staff he’s hiring. But what’s interesting is that he knows what he doesn’t know, and at least seems willing to “get on it.”
Contrast that with the Royals: yes, I think it’s good that Moore brought in Piccolo if he thought Ladnier wasn’t doing the job (although Ladnier has pretty much exactly the same Braves background as the rest of the golf-shirt wearing crowd at Kaufman does), and Arbuckle seems like a good addition, too. But they all have the exact same background and approach. The Royals have one stats guy, Jin Wong, and a consultant who also has worked for the Mariners at the same time, Mats Olkin. You think Dayton gives as much weight to those guys’ thoughts as to his ol’ scouting buddies?
Anyway, this is your blog, not mine, but I wanted to get these thoughts down. Different perspectives are good. We need yours, since even a good reporter like Mellinger can’t bring himself to call out DMGM because “somehow” he improved the franchise each of the last 3 seasons (which was totally Meche and Soria, and not at all Baird-era crap like Greinke, Gordon, DeJesus, and the guy they tried their best not to play, Mike Aviles). And Dayton Moore needs to start listening to people familiar with how baseball personnel acquisition might have changed since 1947.
Minda Haas
January 17, 2009 at 3:16 pm (UTC 0) Link to this comment
Man, d_f, way to leave a comment that’s longer than the original entry! But seriously, thanks for your thoughts. You said:
“That’s overly harsh — and the real fact of sabermetrics is not ‘stats only,’ but putting stats and scouting and all that stuff in proper perspective.”
I agree and understand completely. That’s exactly why it’s so frustrating to see some of the signings we’ve had this winter, whether they’re gritty utility backups or overpaid relievers. Our front office’s actions have nothing to do with the words they have given us from the start. If they *know* about any new measures of statistical analysis, they aren’t using that knowledge at all, so they’re just wasting resources and slowing the progress of the organization.
Thanks for sharing the tidbit about Roth. That’s pretty interesting and rather sad, and I hope that’s not how the Royals are treating Jin Wong, because there’s no point in having a Stat Guy if nobody uses what he knows!
kabrink
January 17, 2009 at 3:53 pm (UTC 0) Link to this comment
As an aside re: Fantasy Island. RIP Ricardo Montalban. May you always sit on rich Corinthian leather.
Tim Daloisio
January 23, 2009 at 7:00 pm (UTC 0) Link to this comment
Minda…great to have you on board at MVN and if this post is a harbinger of things to come, we’re very lucky to have you around.
Minda Haas
January 24, 2009 at 10:40 pm (UTC 0) Link to this comment
Thanks Tim, that means a lot. Hopefully we’ll keep the readable stuff coming, although I’ve been on a bus for 48 of the last 72 hours so I’ll stop typing for now. Sanity to return at a later date…